A beluga whale discovered with a harness strapped around its neck in Norwegian waters five years ago \u2013 and found dead on August 31 \u2013 had a stick stuck in its mouth and its death was not related to human activity, police said on Monday. <\/p>\n
The body of Hvaldimir \u2013 a combination of the Norwegian word for whale and the first name of Russian President Vladimir Putin \u2013 was spotted a week ago floating in the sea by a father and son fishing in southern Norway. <\/p>\n
The animal became the subject of media attention when it was discovered off Norway\u2019s Arctic coast in 2019 wearing a harness with what appeared to be a mount for a small camera. <\/p>\n
Norway and Russia share a maritime border in the Arctic, leading to jokes that the whale was a Russian spy. <\/p>\n
Norwegian police had opened an investigation into the death of the animal after two animal rights groups filed a complaint. <\/p>\n
An autopsy showed a stick measuring 35 centimeters in length (14 inches) and 3 centimeters wide (1.2 inches) was stuck in the whale\u2019s mouth, police for the South West district said in a statement. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe autopsy showed that its stomach was empty. In addition, most organs had broken down,\u201d police said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere is nothing in the investigations that have been carried out to establish that it is human activity that has directly led to Hvaldimir\u2019s death.\u201d <\/p>\n
As a result, police would not investigate further, they added. <\/p>\n
The animal rights groups had alleged the whale had been shot dead. On Monday, police said Hvaldimir had sustained some injuries but that they were \u201ccompletely superficial,\u201d adding \u201cthere was no evidence suggesting that Hvaldimir was shot.\u201d <\/p>\n
A full report will be ready in two weeks, it said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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A beluga whale discovered with a harness strapped around its neck in Norwegian waters five years ago \u2013 and found dead on August 31 \u2013 had a stick stuck in its mouth and its death was not related to human activity, police said on Monday. The body of Hvaldimir \u2013 a combination of the Norwegian word for whale and the first name of <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7459,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-7458","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}